The Irrelevance of Winning

Well, its now a week since we had the result of the court hearing, and a bit less since it stopped being news. But I did just want to quickly comment on something I have noticed: that the media weren’t interested in reporting who actually won it seems. Instead, its all about who briefed them fast enough to get their message across.

Sadly the Climate Campers didn’t manage to get out of the court fast enough to realise what BAA were up to. The reason so many reports basically talked of the camp “which was to take place”, i.e. is no longer going ahead, was because BAA were determined to win the war of words. It didn’t seem to matter that the injunction had just been written as completely in the camp’s favour as possible without handing us blank paper.

I’m told that even the bus station in the very middle of terminals 1,2&3 might be unaffected, let alone the camp itself. This is a major defeat for BAA. Also, one of the four individuals was ruled out of the injunction after BAA was forced to admit that this person should never have been in there, and to apologise. In fact, BAA will have to pay the costs for the case, which I assume are pretty huge.

But alas, we live in a world where the news is so subjective that where the Times says “BAA lose case for injunction”, other papers say “BAA wins injunction”, effectively the opposite message.

But above this, with the injunction now piffling short, the real task is to convince people that the camp is still on. We may have lost the injunction case, then won almost every battle over its contents, but we’re now faced a large section of the public believing its been canceled, which will serve BAA much more than having an injunction ever would. So who cares who won, its all a matter of press briefings anyway.